Abnormality in News Stories

Abstract

Abstract. What makes people show emotional responses toward victims of social injustice in news stories? What are the behavioral consequences of these emotions? Using an online experiment, this study examined the effects of abnormality perception on how people make cognitive and affective assessments of a negative social event. We found that content abnormality (i.e., an unusual/unexpected event) perceived in news stories leads people to attribute less responsibility to the victim and experience stronger emotional responses (i.e., anger and sadness). This in turn increases the desire for a stronger punishment toward the perpetrator. Syntactic abnormality (i.e., negation) indirectly influenced punitive judgment by increasing the responsibility attributed to the offender. The use of negation as the dominant sentence structure (syntactic abnormality) reduced prosocial intentions, but only when the news story was depicted as an abnormal occurrence (content abnormality). These findings illuminate the interconnections between abnormality perception, emotion, and judgment.